September in the 2020 calendar series by David Wiegers brings us to the tiny city state of San Marino, where Abraham Lincoln not only makes a showing, he’s a citizen.
I actually wrote about this way back in 2013 in a post called “Did Abraham Lincoln Have Dual Citizenship?” It turns out he did. As I wrote then:
Tiny as it is, San Marino apparently had a good marketing department when they decided to send a letter to the new President of the United States in 1861. Two recently discovered documents have now been provided to The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a project “dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his entire lifetime (1809-1865).”
Read more on the original post.
This month’s calendar shows the bust of Lincoln by Raymond Barger presented by the United States to the Republic of San Marino in 1932. It has a place of prominence in the Palazzo Pubblico, which serves as the official town hall and federal government building. Since San Marino is so small (it’s considered a microstate completely surrounded by Italy and barely showing up on a map), the Palazzo is the seat of the Republic’s main institutional and administrative bodies, which are the Captains Regent, the Grand and General Council, the Council of XXII, and the Congress of State, all packed into a building much tinier than you might expect. The building itself looks like an old castle, with battlements topping a series of corbels. A clock tower gives height to an otherwise unimpressive building. Essentially, Palazzo Pubblico looks like Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio met Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Still, its small-town population managed to convince Abraham Lincoln to become a citizen. Given the timing – May 1861, a mere few weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter – Lincoln may have been thinking about contingencies should the newly started Civil War not go the way he hoped.
In all my travels in Italy I’ve never been to San Marino. COVID has eliminated travel until at least next year, but once Europe lets Americans within their borders again, I’ll be visiting Lincoln at the Palazzo Pubblico.
David J. Kent is an avid traveler, scientist, and Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World as well as two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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I saw San Marino as a kid. I seem to recall an old castle, and a lot of walking… uphill. More recently, it entered my consciousness as at one point having the highest per-capita GDP of any country in the world (after Monaco and Liechtenstein quit reporting their GDPs).
Seems like all this little city states are incredibly rich. Not sure why, although I suppose they wouldn’t exist if they weren’t given the limits on production capacity. All three are on my list to see, plus Andorra. Somehow I missed all the little ones on my European travels.